IT Services achieve Customer Service Excellence Award

I’m delighted to say that IT Services have joined the list of departments within the University to have achieved the Customer Service Excellence (CSE) Award. A number of our fellow departments including Facilities Management and Learning Services already completed the award (the latter have held it for 8 years!) and it’s great to have achieved it ourselves.

IT Services scored full compliance across all 52 criteria of customer service, covering everything from core customer service principles to monitoring, community support and accessibility. However the good news doesn’t end there, the CSE system supports a concept of “Compliance Plus”, where the service provided is either of an exceptional standard or especially innovative. IT Services received five of these Compliance Plus awards from our submission, covering the following areas:

Developing Customer insight to better understand their needs and preferences.

Tailoring our service to support hard-to-reach or disadvantage groups.

Providing customers with relevant information via multiple channels.

Working with providers and partners to supply co-ordinated services.

Benchmarking our performance and using it to improve our service.

While this provides reassurance of being on the right path we don’t intend to settle there. Our whole team is committed to not only maintaining the standards required for retaining the award in future, but also pushing our service forward so that we can deliver further “compliance plus” levels of customer service in other areas. I was part of the team that worked on the CSE compliance plus submission and thought it would be useful to share some of the practises that Infrastructure Solutions brought to those areas.

For our Active Directory project work the team worked incredibly hard to develop a better understanding of all our customers requirements. The massive levels of change involved in a project of this scale required that our staff worked closely with the other departments around campus. Designing the new role based user permissions and mapping our Active Directory structure to that of the departments organisational charts could only be done successful when our team understood how the different parts of the University interacted and worked together. We were able to build many useful relationships with our customers during this process and have strived to maintain that connection and continue working as partners. The pending migration to Office 365 and Outlook E-Mail will hopefully be a smooth transition thanks to this collaboration and we will once again be working side by side with departments to ease the change over.

Part of our submission for providing customer information talked about the public screen saver project that my team provided. If you visit any student area you will see a rotating slideshow of information on any computer that isn’t logged in. Web Services provide us with a number of slides from the large information screens (like the ones in the hub) and we push these out all around campus. It might seem a small thing but it’s proved a useful channel of communication for our department and the University as a whole. We’ve even customised the screen saver to provide different content in areas like the library so staff and students get information relevant to where they are.

Hopefully there will be many more projects along these lines and we will continue to improve the service we provide on all fronts. The customer service excellent programme is a really good way to sanity check the work you are doing and help you stay focused on keeping the customer at the heart of your service. I certainly enjoyed the process and believe that we learnt a lot about ourselves and were able to set some targets so we can achieve even more in the future.